New visions of the universe opened up by Higgs boson discovery

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: It’s rare that excitement from the esoteric world of theoretical physics spills over into the everyday, but that’s what’s happened with the confirmation the Higgs boson exists.

Part of it is thanks to a catchy term — it’s been dubbed the “god particle.” But the furore is really linked to the fact the discovery goes a long way to explaining how mass came to be, hence the origin of everything in our universe, including planets, stars and people.

It’s a confirmation that has been long in coming: in the 1960s, Peter Higgs, a young physicist at the University of Edinburgh, theorized the particle must exist, an heretical view that led to his vilification by the scientific establishment of the day.

Half a century later, Prof. Higgs, now 83, was in the audience of physicists in Geneva as researchers from the CERN Large Hadron Collider announced — to cheers — two separate experiments had confirmed his theory with 99.9999% certainty.
That’s although the elusive particle can barely be see, as Eryn Brown reported for the Los Angeles Times,

[A] subatomic particle that exists for a mere fraction of a second. Long theorized but never glimpsed, the so-called God particle is thought to be key to understanding the existence of all mass in the universe. The revelation Wednesday that it — or some version of it — had almost certainly been detected amid more than hundreds of trillions of high-speed collisions in a 17-mile track near Geneva prompted a group of normally reserved scientists to erupt with joy.

Journalists lined up to provide elucidation for readers, like this one from Josh Walton at WebProNews.

Over the past couple of days, you may have read that scientists have found the Higgs boson. You may have even heard some people refer to it as the “God Particle.” You also may have just glossed over that headline because why would you care that they’ve found it, when you don’t even know why the hell they were looking in the first place?
In short (really short), the Higgs boson is hypothetical particle (boson) present in a Higgs field. The Higgs boson was first mentioned in 1964 as a way to explain the Higgs mechanism, or, the way in which particles acquire mass.

He also linked to video of a wild man with a beard, who turned out to be another British physicist John Ellis, explaining the phenomenon in terms of a snowfield.

At The Economist, its editorial writers had no doubt about the cosmic significance of the event.

Like the uncovering of DNA’s structure by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953, the discovery of the Higgs makes sense of what would otherwise be incomprehensible. Its significance is massive. Literally. Without the Higgs there would be no mass. And without mass, there would be no stars, no planets and no atoms. And certainly no human beings. Indeed, there would be no history. Massless particles are doomed by Einstein’s theory of relativity to travel at the speed of light. That means, for them, that the past, the present and the future are the same thing.
Such power to affect the whole universe has led some to dub the Higgs “the God particle”. That, it is not. It does not explain creation itself. But it is nevertheless the most fundamental discovery in physics for decades.

There were some sour grapes from the Americans. In a blog for The Washington Post, Brad Plummer explained why the U.S. missed the bus on this one.

The Higgs could have been discovered about a decade earlier — and in Texas rather than Switzerland. Back in the 1980s, American physicists were developing a particle accelerator three times as powerful as Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. But Congress eventually cut off funds and the project collapsed …
“In the early 1980s the U.S. began plans for the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, which would accelerate protons to 20 TeV, three times the maximum energy that will be available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider,” said Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel prize for physics. …
So the United States could have had solid bragging rights for the Higgs, but Congress didn’t want to pay for a $10 billion particle accelerator after the Cold War ended. Now, one way to look at this is that the Higgs got located anyway — with Europeans mostly footing the bill — so what’s the harm? Who cares who discovers the thing, as long as it gets discovered?

It’s left to Higgs himself to explain about the “god particle” moniker. In a rare interview with The Guardian’s James Randerson in 2008, he said,

Its theistic nickname was coined by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, but Higgs himself is no fan of the label. “I find it embarrassing because, though I’m not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people.”
It wasn’t even Lederman’s choice. “He wanted to refer to it as that ‘goddamn particle’ and his editor wouldn’t let him,” says Higgs.

As for the other part of the name — boson — this is also named after a physicist, Einstein’s Indian contemporary, Satyendra Nath Bose.